‘Fighting for survival:’ NZ Rugby boss
The return date for rugby in New Zealand remains up in the air as the nation prepares to go into an unprecedented four-week period of self-isolation due to the coronavirus pandemic.
New Zealand Rugby chief executive Mark Robinson, speaking on Sky’s The Breakdown show on Tuesday, admitted rugby was ‘‘fighting for its survival’’ but the million-dollar question of when rugby could return – and in what format – could not yet be answered.
‘‘I guess the key thing is when we actually get the green light to get back into it,’’ Robinson said.
‘‘There’s a whole range of possibilities of what that might look like. It could be Super, it could involve Mitre 10.
‘‘All those things are up in the air at the moment and we’ve got a team of people much more clever than I am around competition modelling and understanding windows and calendars.’’
NZ Rugby had been planning to stage a series of Kiwi derbies to replace Super Rugby but bowed to the inevitable on Monday and canned that idea after the government announced the country was going into a month-long lockdown.
Robinson admitted the shutdown was causing stress ‘‘at all levels’’ of rugby throughout the country but any decisions on what the game would look like for the rest of the year wouldn’t be made until next week at the earliest.
‘‘We’re fighting for sport’s survival in New Zealand around rugby and if you can’t get motivated by that challenge and the opportunity that sits beyond that then we’ll never be motivated.
‘‘It’s challenging and obviously it’s creating anxiety in our game at all levels, from our clubs and community level and into our professional ranks,’’ Robinson said on The Breakdown.
‘‘But we’ve got great people working on this.